The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

By Heather F. Lutze

To be successful in business you must be able to attract the right clients and persuade them to buy. However, on the internet, people only see what the search engines direct them to and the competition for those top spots is fierce. So how do you ensure that your business is front-and-center when prospects are searching for solutions? The answer is The Findability Formula. The Findability Formula is for anyone who wants to improve results from Internet marketing. The book is specifically written for business owners who are frustrated with a website that is not showing up in search results and not generating business. The Findability Formula will help readers understand how prospects and customers search for products and services on the Internet, and will show them, step-by-step, how to optimize their findability. The book will be a non-technical guide to effectively building and implementing, from the ground up, an Internet search marketing program that gets results. The reader will learn how paid search works, and how paid and organic search can work together to create optimum web visibility and reduce paid search costs over time. The basic message of the book is that there is a formula for findability and for converting prospects to purchasers.

Readers' Benefits from The Findability Formula:
* A complete step-by-step approach to search engine marketing applicable to any product or service, The Findability Formula will include easy-to-follow instruction from chapter to chapter as well as launch checklists in the appendix.
* The most up-to-date search research and statistics available, including uncommon ways to connect with your online buyer.
* Shows the reader how to avoid common search marketing mistakes that cost big money. How to not be bullied and take control of in-house e-commerce department strategies and SEM agencies.
* A small company can compete successfully in search with larger, well-established competitors. How to work smarter to get even better search engine "findability".
* Maximizes the reader's investment. The reader won't waste money by needlessly paying for "clicks" from customers who have no intention of buying. The investment in this book will be repaid thousands of times over.
* Saves time, money and energy in creating in-house search marketing programs and properly tracking results by keyword. Negates the need to hire outside SEM agencies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9780470445648

Book preview

004

CHAPTER 1

The Basics

The Long and Short of It

The Findability Formula is a search marketing guide for driving prospective customers to your site and delivering a user experience that converts those prospects into customers.

The formula has been crafted around two proven fundamental principles:

1. The secret to Internet marketing success is using the right keywords at the right time so that searchers can easily find you, That is what we call findability.

2. You must also appropriately connect with your prospects at all times by providing a relevant result in response to their search,

That is what we call delivering a good user experience.

The second principle, though often overlooked, is as important as the first. You can’t just focus on being found and ranked by the search engines because customers—not the search engines—are your target audience. Properly focusing on your customers’ wants and needs gets you results in terms of sales and search engine rankings. That’s why these two principles working together are the secret to Internet success.

This approach lets customers win because they are getting what they want and need; it lets search engines win because they are in the business of delivering good results to searchers; and it lets you win, because you’ve cracked the findability code and are showing up with good rankings in Internet searches on relevant pages relating to your product or service. This is the sweet spot where searchers are converted to buyers. It not only improves your bottom line by generating sales, it also improves your search engine rankings.

Improved ranking means better placement on a results page, which in turn usually means more site visitors; further improve your visibility, and therefore, your sales. It is a perfect circle of success breeding success. Additionally, as your paid ads begin to attract more clicks, you can actually end up paying less for them.

Let’s move on to defining some of the terms we’ll be using throughout the book.

Definitions

Findability

What is findability?

Wikipedia’s definition of findability is spot-on in relation to search marketing. Wikipedia defines findability as the quality of being locatable or navigable; and this is exactly what you’re after in the realm of search marketing.

Sometimes people confuse findability with branding, and they’re two different things. The goal of branding is to get something (company, name, product, service) known. It’s about name recognition and is an effort to penetrate or saturate a given market space by getting a name, tagline, or logo out there. Branding doesn’t require any action, response, or feedback from the customer. In that way, it might be considered a passive marketing approach.

Findability is an active process. It requires action on the part of the company to make itself findable and it requires an act on the part of the customer—first by initiating a search, and then by clicking on an ad or a search result.

Findability

Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable.

At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval.

Findability is not limited to the World Wide Web. The concept of findability is universal and timeless. However, with a distributed, heterogeneous collection of several billion items, the Web does present unique and important findability challenges.

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Findability on the web means:

You know how and when to appear on the first page of search engine results under the right keywords at the right time.

This book can guide you in that process.

Keywords

A keyword is any word or series of words (also known as keyphrases) entered into a search box on a search engine. This term can be confusing to members of the search marketing industry, because it’s used in that field to mean either a single keyword (i.e. TV) and/or a keyword phrase (big screen TV) and/or a keyword string/search string (big screen plasma TV Denver). We call all these terms keywords because in the world of search engine marketing, a keyword is simply any term a searcher types into a search box. Whatever people type into a search box is called a keyword—even if it’s more than one word. When searchers use a long string of words in their search, we sometimes refer to the keyword as a keyword string or a long tail keyword or a long tail search term, or a search string, and we generically refer to any search term as a keyword.

Keywords are the starting point for every prospect or customer when performing a search or making a purchase online. They are how your customers navigate the search process and how the search engines deliver results pages to searchers.

Search Engines

Search engines are the aggregators and classifiers of all the information available on the web. While at one time you might have visited a library and asked the librarian for information, today’s librarians on the World Wide Web are the search engines. Instead of asking the librarian where you might find information on, say, Yugoslavia and having her direct you to those resources, now you type in Yugoslavia, and the search engines respond with links to the resources on that topic available on the web. We call the search engines’ response to your query search results, search engine results, or just plain results.

Search Engine Results

There are two different groups of results: sponsored results, which is a term for results that an advertiser paid to show up on that page (through a paid search campaign); and there are organic results, which means the entry is there by virtue of the relevance of its web content and the repetition of certain keywords on its web pages. Getting your web site to show up in those results—and preferably on the first page of those results—is the science of search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (also called SEM and search marketing) refers to marketing activities designed to increase the visibility or findability of a company, product, service, activity, organization or web site in search engine results. The two common methods of search marketing are paid search and search engine optimization.

Paid Search

Paid search is sometimes referred to as pay per click (PPC), or cost per click (CPC). With paid search, an advertiser is paying the search engines to display its ad on a particular search result page. Each time a searcher clicks on that ad, the search engine charges the advertiser’s account a certain amount for each